This website provides information on the Pervasive Advertising Workshop Series and on the upcoming Book on Pervasive Advertising (to appear in Springer HCI Series in July 2011).
Pervasive Advertising
As pervasive computing technologies leave the labs, they are starting to be used for the purpose of advertising. Pervasive Advertising has the potential to affect everyone’s life, but it seems that a knowledge gap is preventing us from shaping this development in a meaningful way. In particular, many marketing and advertising professionals have an expert understanding of their trade, but are unaware of recent advances in pervasive computing technologies, the opportunities they offer, and the challenges they pose. Similarly, many pervasive computing researchers and professionals are on top of the recent technological advances, but lack basic marketing and advertising expertise and therefore an understanding of how their technology can influence these fields. The Pervasive Advertising Community intends to close this gap and provide the means to meaningfully shape the future of pervasive advertising.
Definition of Pervasive Advertising
Analogous to developments on the Internet, it is our belief that advertising will be the business model that drives pervasive computing. The goal of advertising is to impart information, evoke emotions, and trigger actions. The properties of pervasive computing (automation, interactivity, ubiquity) make it a powerful tool for achieving these goals. These properties have the potential to change advertising in six main ways: symmetric communication, long tail, experiences, personalization, audience measurement, and automated persuasion.
Traditionally, advertising is defined as any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor. Pervasive computing environments are saturated with computing and communication capabilities, yet these features are integrated so seamlessly for the user that it becomes ‘the technology that disappears.’ Based on these definitions, we define pervasive advertising as:
Pervasive advertising is the use of pervasive computing technologies for advertising purposes.